The Peripatetic Reviewer

IT IS usual in America to lament the vanishing past after the bulldozer and highway engineer have demolished it beyond recall. Here and there little pockets do survive to remind us of the style and beauty of colonial life. Main Street, Nantucket, with the Starbuck and Coffin houses; Chestnut Street, Salem, with the McIntire houses and stables, the gift of the clipper ships; the splendid river plantations on the James, like Westover, Berkeley, and Shirley; Beacon Hill in Boston; Richmond’s Church Hill; the gardens and mansions of Charleston, South Carolina; Orford, Lyme, and Haverhill on the Upper Connecticut; and the Vieux Carré in New Orleans have all become national monuments, too precious to destroy, though it is seldom appreciated how much individual effort is required to keep them in a healthy state of preservation. These will be shrines in the future for a people who are historyhungry.

But for every town which has protected even a fragment of its heritage there are fifty which have wiped it clean away. The river towns of the Midwest, as I walk through them, seem to have been most ruthless in their self-effacement. St. Joe, the jumping-off place for the forty-niners, has — or had — a row of spacious two-level mansions, Southern in architecture, with a commanding view of the broad Missouri below. I suppose they were built on the proceeds of the outfitting; when I last saw them they were going to rack and ruin, too big to be lived in without servants, too vulnerable to preserve. History lives on in a city’s street names and in symbols: Fort Wayne, with its forlorn plaque to remind us of the once-shaded river bower where Audubon loved to paint; Pittsburgh, with its lone, small blockhouse, last vestige of the river frontier; Cincinnati and St. Louis, where the old excursion boats are the only suggestion that those riverbanks were ever used for anything but commerce. Washington alone, because it is by nature a decorative, not industrial, place, has sought to beautify its riverbanks.

The desire to preserve and restore became a determined force in this century, as it had to if the urbanization of the contractor and developer was to be held at bay on the ancient sites and if the fragments of lovely but doomed dwellings were to be kept. We are all grateful to the Emerson family for buying and presenting Walden Pond to the Commonwealth; to the Pell family for their restoration of Fort Ticonderoga; to Mrs. Watson Webb for her forethought in collecting and mounting the New England antiquities at Shelburne Museum; to Harry Sleeper, the architect, for the interiors, salvaged from ruin, which he fitted together in his Gloucester Museum, Beauport; and to Henry DuPont for the exquisite taste and impeccable authenticity with which he has built up the even more comprehensive Winterthur in Wilmington. Some, like Sturbridge Village or the Whaling Museum at Mystic Seaport, were the result of committee planning, and I hope I shall live to see many more such projects in being, ranging from the restoration of a famous house like General Beauregard’s in New Orleans, rescued by Frances Parkinson Keyes, to the resuscitation of a deserted mining town, as Walter Paepcke did with Aspen. But I doubt if any in the future will exceed the vision and generosity with which that quiet giver, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., revived colonial Williamsburg.

Mount Vernon and Monticello came down to us intact; and the problem, once the roof was tight, was to refurnish the dwelling as nearly as possible in the style of the famous owner, in itself an incredibly expensive undertaking. The vision with which Dr. Goodwin, rector of the Bruton Parish Church, inspired Mr. Rockefeller in 1926 was to reawaken the colonial capital of Virginia; this had once been the heart of a vigorous, loyal colony — could it be made to beat again? A careful appraisal was made of the eighteenth-century houses still standing, eighty-three in all, some brick, some frame, many hidden and defaced. The public school which obscured the sight of the Governor’s Palace would have to be moved elsewhere; of the Capitol with its Hall of Burgesses, where Patrick Henry, Washington, and Thomas Jefferson spoke on the eve of independence, not a brick remained. But in archives, American and British, were wills, inventories, diaries, and books to tell how Williamsburg was built, where one supped and danced, what was argued, and who carried weight. Not just the taverns and showplaces must be revived, but the workshops, the public jail, the handicrafts, the Magazine, the gardens, yes, even the mental hospital (the first established in North America, and still something of a problem). Appraisers, architects, historians, curators, and archaeologists, the team grew to be an institution dedicated to the accurate exposition of a colonial community. Those who have seen the films of the dusty, sleeping town before the renovation can get some idea of the ever-increasing scope of the undertaking.

When, in June of 1928, Dr. Goodwin revealed at a town meeting that Mr. Rockefeller was in back of the project, it was understood that the latter would finance the whole operation, even if the costs ran to four or five million dollars. No one could possibly have realized that thirty years later the work would still go on, that the total cost would have soared to more than seventy million, and that the Rockefeller brothers would continue to finance new acquisitions.

Once begun, the ambition to round out every aspect of a restored area becomes as compelling to the trustees as it is to the professionals on the team. The property of Widow Custis, the Martha who was to marry George Washington, is a case in point. Only a fragment of the kitchen outbuilding now stands, for the house and gardens were in time gradually engulfed by the expanding mental institution, but the ground plans, the interior detail, and the avenue of trees which bordered the estate are all known, and all this will be more than a gleam in the eye when the title is cleared and the funds are available.

Upwards of a million visitors come to Williamsburg each year, a third of them repeaters. They return to saturate their children in the spirit of the place, to see anew George Seaton’s stirring film The Story of a Patriot, which portrays so vividly the anguish of indecision in the days leading to independence — whether to be loyal to the King or to stand up against the grievances. They come back to marvel at the handmade beauty of the town, to sense the snugness as the little houses light up of an evening, to watch the militia drill, to enjoy the taverns, and to feel at day’s end a re-identification with a young, audacious America.

Since 1957 IVOR NOËL HUME has been the chief archaeologist at Williamsburg, and in his delightfully detailed book, HERE LIES VIRGINIA (Knopf, $7.95), he combines the faculties of a trained historian and detective, expert at unearthing the past. Old cellars, wells, and trash pits are the mines he explores, and from the fragments of glass, the pottery, the old buttons, or a rusted flintlock, he recreates the life which actually went on in these dwellings.

He begins by describing the three periods of settlement: the sixteenth-century adventures on Roanoke Island and the mystery of the Lost Colony; then Jamestown; and on to the security and flowering of Williamsburg in the eighteenth century. He writes easily and imaginatively of the little ships which must have been so claustrophobic during the five months’ voyage; of the constant fear of fire and the sniping Indian which haunted the settlers once ashore; and of the massacres, like that of 1622, of which no one seems to have been forewarned. “Getting down to hard work,” says Mr. Hume, “was not the strong suit of Englishmen in the golden age of Elizabeth.”

His best chapters are those in which, by piecing together and by his remarkable power of deduction, he leads us to see the life that went on in the great houses which tobacco built, or the equally vivid activity, let us say, in the jail. Nothing escapes his notice; the seals with which a wealthy planter like Robert Carter embossed his wine bottles are just as telling to him as the clay pipes, the silver teaspoons, or the fragments of Rhenish stoneware dated 1661 which he found in the ruins of the first State House at Jamestown. When the cesspit of the Williamsburg jail was explored, there came to light a massive padlock, iron leg shackles, then a skeleton, and, last but not least, gilt and brass buttons which helped to establish when this building was destroyed. The jail could never have been a bed of roses; and there must have been no little satisfaction when the detested British General Henry Hamilton, known as the “Hair Buyer General” because of the way he sicced his Indians on the nonmilitary, was captured and locked up in it for more than a year.

In this book one sees the earthiness, the intimacy of a famous settlement. Mr. Hume has the light touch of an English stylist and a sense of humor which prevents his archaeology from ever being tedious. Some of the people he is dealing with did things on a large scale. I remember on one of my visits to Westover, Sir William Byrd’s famous plantation, asking old Uncle Jim why there was no chapel close to the big house. “Oh, but there was, suh,” he said. “You can see the foundations of it right over there. After Sunday services Sir William would ask his friends to come back for a drink, and, well, some of them would stay until Wednesday. It was Lady Byrd who stopped all that. She made him build a new chapel a couple of miles from here.

Sir William Stephenson, M.C., D.F.C., is a quiet Canadian who received his first decorations as an aviator in World War I. At the end of World War II the Presidential Medal for Merit and a baronetcy were conferred upon him for his brilliant, inconspicuous success in drawing America and Britain into a closer, protective partnership during the peril of 1940, and in thwarting German spies, sympathizers, and saboteurs on this side of the Atlantic. In ROOM 3603 (Farrar, Straus, $4.50) H. MONTGOMERY HYDE shows what manner of man he was and how he operated.

Stephenson had built up a comfortable fortune in Britain in the 1920s, and it was his friendship with a fellow Canadian, Lord Beaverbrook, which brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill when Britain stood alone. Churchill sent him to America to set up the secret, highly intelligent outfit known as the British Security Coordination. Working first from his apartment and then in his headquarters in Room 3603 at 630 Fifth Avenue, “Little Bill” Stephenson was quick to win the trust and admiration of “Big Bill” Donovan. Unobtrusive and wonderfully farsighted in his undercover work, liked and trusted by Lord Lothian, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover, Little Bill began his mission by building up a climate favorable to Britain at the time when the America-firsters and even our ambassador in London had written the English off. As his organization grew — it was to number in the end more than 3000 agents — he was better able to intercept the German strategy and to intervene against the Germans’ economic warfare in Latin America and against those subsidiaries of I. G. Farben which were being quietly poisonous in this country. Little Bill’s swiftness to act, his ability to confound, his uncanny anticipation of where and how the Germans would react, his coolness when pressed, and, above all, his secretiveness are the attributes of an admirable chief of intelligence. If the author occasionally overestimates his influence, we can charge it off to hero worship. When Sir Winston recommended Little Bill for a knighthood, he appended the note to the King,” This one is dear to my heart.”